Trickbot delivered via fake eFax messages

An email with the subject of eFax pretending to come from EFax but actually coming from a whole range of look-a-like domains and for some strange reason today they are also coming from spoofed servicepaypal and NatWest domains with a malicious word doc attachment is today’s latest spoof of a well-known company, bank or public authority delivering Trickbot banking Trojan

Note: these arrived in UK after I went to bed last night. They started to arrive at about 22:20 UK time, which would time them towards the middle or end of the working day in different parts of USA and ready for UK and European recipients when they start the next day

They are using email addresses and subjects that will scare, persuade or entice you to read the email and open the attachment.

Remember many email clients, especially on a mobile phone or tablet, only show the Name in the From: and not the bit in <domain.com >. That is why these scams and phishes work so well.

eFax has not been hacked or had their email or other servers compromised. They are not sending the emails to you. They are just innocent victims in exactly the same way as every recipient of these emails.

What has happened is that the criminals sending these have registered various domains that look like genuine Company, Bank, Government or message sending services. Normally there are between 2 and 4 newly registered domains that imitate Companies House, HMRC, another Government department, a Bank or a message sending service that can easily be confused with the genuine organisation in some way. Some days however we do see dozens or even hundreds of fake domains.

Today’s example of the spoofed domains are all using the free .ml domains that are administered and run by freenom.com.

I am seeing domains ranging from efaxmessage1.ml to efaxmessage499.ml all being hosted on different IP numbers & ranges all appearing to be compromised ISP IP numbers from major ISPs in UK, Europe & USA. In previous phishing and malware scams by this criminal gang they used a range of domain numbers between 1 and 600 over several days, so there could be a lot more to come.

Also today, the criminals have reused other .ml domains that have been previously used in other recent malware campaigns that are still live.

This malware file downloads from http://jbt-eng.com/kas15.png which of course is not an image file but a renamed .exe file that gets renamed to qmrisjb4.exE ( VirusTotal)

An alternative download location is http://modeurop.ch/kas15.png

This email attachment contains a genuine word doc with a macro script that when run will download from one of the above URLs and infect you.

The word doc looks like:

All modern versions of word and other office programs, that is 2010, 2013, 2016 and 365, should open all Microsoft office documents that is Word docs, Excel spreadsheet files and PowerPoint etc that are downloaded from the web or received in an email automatically in “protected view” that stops any embedded malware or macros from being displayed and running. Make sure protected view is set in all office programs to protect you and your company from these sorts of attacks and do not over ride it to edit the document. If the protected mode bar appears when opening the document DO NOT follow the advice they give to enable macros or enable editing to see the content. The document will have a warning message, but you will be safe.

Be aware that there are a lot of other dodgy word docs spreading that WILL infect you with no action from you, if you are still using an out dated or vulnerable version of word. This is a good reason to update your office programs to a recent version and stop using office 2003 and 2007. Many of us have continued to use older versions of word and other office programs, because they are convenient, have the functions and settings we are used to and have never seen a need to update to the latest super-duper version.

The risks in using older version are now seriously outweighing the convenience, benefits and cost of keeping an old version going.

At this time, these malicious macros only infect windows computers. They do not affect a Mac, IPhone, IPad, Blackberry, Windows phone or Android phone. The malicious word or excel file can open on any device with an office program installed, and potentially the macro will run on Windows or Mac or any other device with Microsoft Office installed. BUT the downloaded malware that the macro tries to download is windows specific, so will not harm, install or infect any other computer except a windows computer. You will not be infected if you do not have macros enabled in Excel or Word. These Macros do not run in “Office Online” Open Office, Libre Office, Word Perfect or any other office program that can read Word or Excel files.